AI slop is the future of gacha ig...I went full surprised pikachu face when I saw how popular that game is, the pictures make it look like the most low-effort app store cashgrab possible how tf did it get that fanbase? Gooner games aren't exactly a fresh market
AI will pretty much be embedded with gaming in general in due time.
This gets referenced a bunch in reddit, but just look at the old horse armor DLC in Skyrim that first drew ire from people. Now that kind of monetization is pretty much just treated as default in gaming.
All these companies need to do is wait because the younger generations are all going to or have grown up with AI being the norm and they don't know anything else.
As a result, it'll eventually just be normalized and the older population who grew up in a different environment will just be "the old codgers resistant to change."
If AI is good you should not be able to tell AI was used. We're already close to that point essentially.
What people hate is "AI Slop" when it's blatantly obvious AI was used. And when people without any artistic skill or taste try to use it and think the result looks good(it does not).
But when AI is used as a "power multiplier" by an already skilled artist, you almost can't tell the difference.
In fairness, unlike horse armor I'm curious about the infrastructure implications of AI.
The resource load, both software and just literal building power needs, are very likely to get regulated by various governments if AI tech companies can't dramatically change their energy needs.
It's a bit complex. AI does take up a lot of the usage of all the new data centres being built, but so does other thing like, e.g., cloud computing. And it does also tend to very wildly swing in how much it uses: gpt4 ended up using something like 1/44 the amount of water/power that it used to, but then gpt5 was using eight times as much again. And it's usually hard to find completely transparent numbers on it except iirc from Google.
And then you get into the fact that a lot of AI stuff isn't the flashy LLM and image generator stuff the public sees, but unglamorous yet actually profitable entertprise systems for business and research.
We'd definitely be better off if we were slowing the rate of adoption (stopping it isn't feasible, it's already permeated a lot more than people tend to think and in some areas that's not even a bad thing), but there's a LOT of money invested in trying to speedrun it because of the perceived competitive advantages of controlling that infrastructure and development, and in the US a government that doesn't really give a shit about climate implications of the new fossil fuel power plants that'll need to carry the increased load, nor the suffering of the people who're getting affected by the costs of those data centre complexes hoovering up power equivalent to medium-sized cities.
This is true. We're also discussing gacha companies though, which are primarily nonUS based. I'm not sure how fast AI usage will end up regulated on national levels, both from a use standpoint and an infrastructure standpoint. It's inevitable that it'll end up regulated on some level, it's going to be interesting to see how much.
This is all to say that the way Dragon Traveler uses AI probably isn't representative of the future of the industry.
It's not just the US, there's tons of data centres springing up in China too (though they also have a ton of nuclear plants in the pipeline so at least the climate impact won't be as great, hopefully).
I think Nikke's use of AI is probably more indicative of the future than Dragon Traveler right now, since most games using obviously AI-generated art are low-budget shovelware, but it's hard to say until we see something that's actually ambitious and fun but still uses it. And as you say, there's a lot about regulation that's still up in the air right now, which is a big part of the reason companies are still reluctant to commit to it (and why Adobe Firefly exists as an "ethical" AI alternative that theoretically licensed or took from the public domain everything it used for training, although it's debatable whether reality matches that claim).
has been so since like 2023, maybe even earlier. Back then I was accompanying my dad in the hospital so I had nothing to do and browsed QooApp for new/random shit to try. So many obviously AI generated thumbnails it made me sick.
Played it myself since launch day. I honestly just wanted to play bcz of the honeymoon phase which was surprisingly enjoyable due to the massive amount of rewards. Although now its sort of over and the rewards have completely diminished by a margin😂 Deleted the game yesterday 🤷🏻
Its a solid AFK Arena clone. Pretty much released with every system any of these games have, and is basically as stock standard AFK Arena/Journey clone as you can get, and means itll have a solid 2-3 month honeymoon phase.
I dont think itll last more than a couple months though. Once all the freebies dry up, its way more P2W than any of the other AFK Idle games, but they are giving away like 100 days of summons and crystals, etc. So they gonna milk people for 3 months
But, if you like AFK Idle games at all, its about as stock standard/good as any of hte others so not really a surprise it had a good launch.
I mean, their ad is everywhere. I got their ad a lot, and i can see how attractive it is and the ad music is catchy, i can imagine people clicking the ad and want to try it.
And as someone who knows nothing about this game, i don't even know they used AI until people mentioned it here, so there's that.
Gave a genre the exact type of game they wanted. Dragon Traveler is like the equivalent if you asked ChatGPT to create an Idle game using all the top Idle games in the market, and thats pretty much what it spit out.
It has basically every single system you have seen in any other idle game; AFK Arena/Journey, Go Go Muffin, etc. Has it all.
So, if the idle game tickles your fancy at all, its a solid game for the honeymoon phase. And then I think Idle games are easily teh most predatory/p2w games out there, so if you can get people playing it at all, THEY WILL SPEND. Easy to drop 10 dollars here, 15 dollars there, because you are always guaranteed what you want; you just need tons of it. So before people know it, they have been nickel and dimed for hundreds of dollars with small guaranteed "value" packs.
But again, anyone that liked AFK Arena/Journey, this game scratches that itch about as well as any game out there, because its like they asked AI to make the most stock standard afk game they could.
Couldn't you theoretically fudge the numbers depending on how it's counted. If it count actual player spend i.e. if i spend a tenner their number goes up by 10 and we assume the platform keeps 30 percent you could spend about 2,3 mio on your own game and push yourself to 7mio as an advertisement.
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u/GamesRepus Feb 01 '26
HOW